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Five Reasons to Consider Hybrid Cloud Computing

There are many reasons to consider a hybrid cloud model. Bill Kleyman highlights five of them.

Cloud computing has become a massive engine helping the corporate and end-user world interconnect at new, massive scales. There is a very real reason that data center business continues to grow around the surge of cloud traffic. There are two very interesting statistic from the latest Cisco Global Cloud Index report:

Annual global data center IP traffic will reach 7.7 zettabytes by the end of 2017. By 2017, global data center IP traffic will reach 644 exabytes per month (up from 214 exabytes per month in 2012).

Global data center IP traffic will nearly triple over the next 5 years. Overall, data center IP traffic will grow at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 25 percent from 2012 to 2017.

There is clear growth in the amount of traffic being pushed through the modern data center. Why? The user, the business and the technology have all evolved. The current generation revolves around a new “on-demand” lifestyle where workloads and information must be available anytime, anywhere and on any device. Mobility has become the new normal and cloud computing is the engine to deliver all of this next-generation content.

So why move to the cloud? Or– why move to this type of specific cloud model? The future of the cloud landscape will revolve around a much more agnostic cloud infrastructure. At some near future point, almost all resources will be interspersed and shared between private and public instances. With that in mind, many still have questions around one of the most popular cloud models – the hybrid cloud environment. So let’s look at five very real use-cases where organizations (and users) leverage the power of the hybrid infrastructure.

Business Strategy

Every year your organization sits down to analyze the future strategic initiatives of your company. If you haven’t looked at some type of cloud model already, you may be falling behind your competition. One great reason to look at a hybrid cloud model is to make your enterprise more dynamically adaptive. First of all, it’s not that challenging any longer to expand your existing data center infrastructure into a cloud model. Secondly, many organizations are already leveraging secondary data centers, application platforms, and data repositories which completely reside in the cloud. Remember, creating a hybrid cloud model doesn’t mean you have to buy out space at Amazon AWS. A diversified cloud solution can be as simple as a SaaS application with a direct connection into your data center or as large as a hot-hot disaster recovery platform running within a cloud-based data center provider.

Content Delivery and Expanding the Edge

Do you have a growing business? May you already have a distributed data center platform but are having issues distributing rich content? Content delivery networks (CDNs) and edge computing are big components of a hybrid cloud. Basically, you can leverage remote data center sites which help you place rich or valuable information closer to the user. Here’s other use-case – what if you’re a compliance or regulation-driven organization? What if you can’t have your information leave a certain region or area? Utilizing the hybrid cloud model and the data delivery mechanisms behind it – you’re able to intelligently control data flow throughout your cloud.

New-Era Business Growth Dynamics

The modern business needs to scale very dynamically. One of the best, and cost-effective, ways to do this is through a hybrid cloud model. Whether it’s an acquisition or an influx of users based on new demand, a hybrid cloud platform allows you to provision resources very quickly without having to invest in your own data center hardware. This can be a temporary use-case for a sudden growth in users, or a permanent model allowing your organization to create regionalized data centers for major offices. Unlike a few years ago, the speed at which organizations grow has changed dramatically. To keep up with competition and growing market demands, companies must adapt much faster and be ready to grow very dynamically. Utilizing a hybrid cloud computing model enables administrators and organizations to scale quickly, efficiently, and with a quantified cost.

Creating Next-Generation Mobility

Enterprise and user mobility has become the new normal. Traditional ways of computing are fading away as we usher a new era around the compute model. We are a data-on-demand generation where mobility and productivity are critical to the success of your organization. Seconds matter as users dynamically request applications, rich data, and even entire virtual workloads to be delivered to a myriad of devices. Hybrid cloud models now incorporate smart technologies like adaptive user orchestration to intelligently optimize data delivery based on location, device type and even security of the connection point. All of this creates better user, content, and resources controls for your data center and organization.

Breaking Traditional Data Center Barriers

Welcome to the truly interconnected world of cloud computing. The modern data center model is now a completely interconnected space that can share resources and information with locations all over the world. It’s really not just “one” data center any more. Rather, these are powerful, logical nodes which are the backbone to all modern technology.

The data center model, as it stands today, can interconnect and help you distribute your environment to a number of different platforms. This is the power of the hybrid cloud and the hybrid data center. New concepts like the software-defined data center (SDDC) and the data center operating system (DCOS) completely redefine the data center model. To have this type of control at the global plane is pretty amazing. You’re now able to completely integrate every aspect of your data center into a powerful control layer, thus creating a truly intelligent hybrid cloud model.

The world is becoming more interconnected. Distance is slowly being conquered by our technological advances where rich content can be delivered across the globe with minimal latency. The cloud and communication model has evolved to a point where almost all organizations need to, at least, understand how this technology works. In most cases, business of all sizes are now adopting some element of cloud computing.

One of the biggest drivers behind a greater cloud is you: the end-user. There are more devices and traditional means of computing are slowly fading away. Beyond the hype and the marketing, there are very real business reasons to move to some type of cloud model or service. To push it aside can now be seen as detrimental to your business.

Moving forward, cloud models will create even more use-cases for a good adoption strategy. The challenge will be to plan accordingly and ensure that your cloud infrastructure can support you both today and in the future.